:.J . , i ''1 , . J.. . ..... ..' .: . .'- .- :;- ß ,.,:-'- ....,.., 108 Catholics make against Protestants- even a Spanish claim-is surely in the Church's interests. On the other hand, she knew that the Pope went to England and said Mass with Protes- tants. She saw the newsreels that day and concluded that in some way he had raised their claim to the F alk- lands to a kind of Catholic legitimacy. Then, too, the Falkland shepherds and their children-she saw them in Libé every day, piling sandbags, helping the British dig their trenches -moved her. She knew from her own experience that they were happier at home, on their wet and windy islands, herding sheep for a trading company that probably un- derpaid them, than they would ever have been in England, looking for jobs, looking for the sort of welcome she looked for in Portugal and never found. N o one expected the British to reach Port Stanley during the Versailles Summit, fog or no fog. When seven rich countries get to- gether to talk about the problems of being rich (including, of course, the problem of being rich with so many poor people around) in the palace where Marie Antoinette told her own poor people to eat cake, it is an occa- sion for high court etiquette which not even Ronald Reagan's plaid suits can entirely spoil. François Mitterrand ran his summit in the style of what Pari- sians now refer to as Imperial Social- ism, and it was not, as one of the diplomat's English house guests put it, a moment for "blood in the teacup." Mitterrand had clearly and consis- tently supported Margaret Thatcher in the Falkland war. Like England, France owns little pieces of the world here and there-from rhetorically re- spectable overseas départements like Réunion, in the Indian Ocean, to the archipelago of Saint-Pierre-et- Miquelon, off Québec, with six thou- sand people. America, of course, has had territories of its own in the South Pacific since the Second World W ar. The Americans at Versailles were ob- viously relieved at not having had to carry the euphemism of "authoritarian Argentina" to France along with Ronald Reagan's bottled water and Nancy Reagan's hairdresser. It was agreeable for them to take the part of a democracy against a junta that, by definition, could justify itself only by fig hting. But at Versailles this month the Americans were mainly uneasy over the possibility that small questions of hegemony, like the Falkland ques- tion, would end up raising bigger questions of prerogative. A friend who was born in Argen- tina and has lived in England and France says that to her mind the real difference between French colonialism and English colonialism is that French- men believe in a kind of immortal nationality, called The French, where- as Englishmen believe in an immortal nation, called Great Britain. Certainly the French colo- nized in the conviction that being French was the high- est human good. They preached a kind of sublime identification to their colo- nials. Thirty years ago in Algeria and Mali and New Caledonia, local children were sitting at French desks in little French schools, follow- ing the same French schedule as any child in Paris or Lyons, memorizing the course of French rivers and the milk production of French cows, mak- ing lists of French kings and calling an this their history. Being French was a quality, an achievement, an exercise in style and desire, like French Catholicism or French Social- ism. It was a quality that travelled like the white Burgundy in the diplomat's cellar, doing fine as long as it was never shaken and never traumatized, and, in fact, it proved to be a fairly durable quality. It inspired resistance and revolution, but in the end It left mosuevolutionaries resolutely Fran- cophile. Being English, on the other hand, had to do with a place and with a language used to describe that place. Colonials were never educated to be English. To be English, they had to sail to England and breathe the air and read the history on English benches and in English libraries. In their own countries, they were not Englishmen but wogs who spoke En- glish. The Englishmen who were sent out, like the Falkland kelpers, clearly could not carry an immortal nation with them. They could only carry a marvellous language to evoke it. Even today, the fact of battleships and ocean liners sailing to islands so remote that the journey alone took nearly two weeks has prompted fewer questions about English ships in far- off seas than quotations about those ships and those seas. The quotations were accurate as to courage and decency on what was, after all, the right side of the war, but they had nothing to do with the realities of a JUNE 28, 1982 trading-company lobbying in West- minster and a small colony of shep- herds, seven thousand miles from any recourse, who were mainly ignored before the Argentine invasion and were subject to elaborate restrictions on their rights as British citizens. England went to war for reasons that in the public mind had less to do with Margaret Thatcher or Francis Pym than with Shakespeare and Donne and Byron. The rest of northern Europe, one suspects, went to war vicariously, because the Falkland Islands provided Europeans with a rare occasion to be openly absolute about their values, and even about their virtues. There were weeks in Apri] of astonishing smug- ness, followed in May by weeks of as- tonishing equivocation in the name of "impartiality" -as if the junta in Buenos Aires had expressed some grave, collective Argentine will by in- vading a couple of rocky islands near Antarctica that in all probability only the English would be foolish or heroic enough to choose to live on for very long. Voltaire was much quoted here during those weeks. After the British started using Hamlet to explain them- selves, the French started using V ol- taire to explain Hamlet: ((. . . U ne pièce grossière et barbare, qui ne serait pas supportée par la plus vile populace de La France et de l'Italie." But the best and possibly the last word on the mad- dogs-and-Englishmen syndrome came from a historical memoir by a fifteenth century diplomat: "N aturellement, les A.ngloys qui ne sont jamais partyz d' A.ngleterre sont fort collericques." E VERYONE in Paris is edgy about terrorists. Through the seventies, it was hard to live here and imagine the violence that afflicted big cities in Germany and Italy and Spain. Paris then was relatively free of terrorists. Giscard d'Estaing pursued a fairly sleazy oil diplomacy in the Middle East, and it bought him a measure of immunity-though clearly not enough to save the four people who were killed when a synagogue on the Rue Copernic was bombed during the last year of his presidency. Mitterrand seems to have cancelled whatever immunity was left by being remarkably equitable and evenhanded in his Middle East poli- cies. Lately, it is the French who have been suffering. Early this month, a local gang that calls itself Direct Ac- tion set off bombs in the American School and in the Paris offices of the International Monetary Fund, but mainly the terrorism here has been